Abundance, Unless You’re Native
Dip talks about how AI sucks again. This time, they focus on how data centers are encroaching on tribal lands.
I want to start this by saying that I’m pissed about what abundance has come to mean. There is something deeply disgusting on a spiritual level about the fact that two splashy books came out about it in 2025… and one already has a “movement” built around it, supported by unsavory folks like billionaire philanthropist John Arnold.
What frustrates me is this: abundance could mean degrowth, or the idea that we can get all that we need and want (if our desires aren’t (petty-)bourgeois) without killing ourselves or the planet in the process. That's not what the abundance agenda people mean, though. They literally mean the opposite: things suck because we’re not trying to grow hard enough, or something like that.
Photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash
The reason I bring this up is because it’s a rehashed version of shit that’s been said before. According to this movement (especially Vox’s Case for Growth vertical), things just have to be electrified to High Hrothgar and back while being powered by AI to dissolve scarcity.
Deregulation is their abundance, built on the bloodied backs of data labelers and a market-oriented take on (the similarly problematic) fully automated luxury communism.
The role of the land is clear in this formulation: nothing more than an abstract plot on which to build; it’s is the only thing to do, from this perspective. A big part of this is the interest in nuclear energy. Given that around half of the domestic uranium reserves are on tribal lands, the options for Native folks seem slim, even with the relatively small amount of uranium that exists domestically, compared to the rest of the world.
Between the millions and millions of tons of ore extracted since the ‘50s and all the abandoned mines, even a specious “partnership” doesn’t seem like it’ll lead to including Native folks in whatever utopic future the Abundance-types are envisioning. Nuclear power–in extreme cases like Chernobyl or Fukushima, or “less” visceral cases like expending waste onto Native reservations–leaves literal and figurative scars on people and place. That kind of stuff cannot be ignored, if the future is meant to allow people to live better lives.
I say fuck a “partnership.” I know that’s easier said than done, but it's better to live in a hell of “our” own making than a heaven of subjection. Instead of having (sections of) tribes or any other marginal or colonized populations “share” in the “bounty” (which is often committing massive abuse for bigger crumbs), folks can build on existing wins. From Ireland to Michigan to Missouri to multiple indigenous nations including the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, people are fighting against and rejecting these things.
That’s true abundance; self-organization in the face of dispossession and abuse.
